Jon Evans - Swarm

“Never mind.” I replaced the phone, tried not to panic. It was all true. I had no proof except my instincts, but I was suddenly horribly sure of it. “Maybe I’ll go for a walk.”

“Not outside,” the man said blandly. “House is sealed off. Security threat.”

“What kind of threat?”

“From Moscow. From Kremlin.”

I stared at him.

“For security we all must remain in house, sir.” His face and voice were utterly expressionless. “Perhaps you should return to your room.”

“Yes.” I could hardly hear myself. I felt like I was falling through the floor towards the molten centre of the earth. “Yes, of course.” There would have been a keylogger and a screen snapper on the computer I had used to chat with Sophie. Now they knew that we knew. Because of me, again.

The well-dressed thug smiled at me politely. Former Russian Special Forces? Maybe. Or maybe a highly trained and deadly FSU agent. Just like Anya Azaryeva.

I lay on the luxurious bed with its thousand-thread-count sheets and tried to tell myself that this couldn’t really be happening. Anya had not played us like Mata Hari. She and her billionaire uncle – or was he really either? – were not secretly employed by the Russian government to cripple America with thousands of Sophie’s drones. I was not being held under mansion arrest, incommunicado.

I had to tell someone of my suspicions, had to try and get out, or at least to find some way to communicate with the outside world. But there was no way. There were no elegant hacks available to me here, no drones, no computers. Nothing to work with, and no way out.

Wait. No. There was a computer in this room. The iPod Touch on the dresser, the one filled with Jesse’s favourite music. Had he loaded it with his favourite apps, too?

He had. Including WireShark, a tool for breaking into poorly secured wireless networks. There were several Wi-Fi signals within range. They could seal me into this mansion, but they couldn’t keep out London’s dizzying array of wireless networks. And while all were secured, one used the deprecated WEP protocol, vulnerable to WireShark’s predations.

I sat back on the bed, cradling the iPod Touch in my hands, breathing a little easier as WireShark did its thing. All was not yet lost. At least I could communicate.

Once in, I called up GChat and reconnected to Sophie. I had to type with one finger, so her text spilled onto the screen first:

SW:lotek and i have been doing some investigating. last month a shipping container was sent from dubai to one of ortega’s front companies in london. same import/export company has been sending a lot to venezuela, too. hard to be sure, all the paperwork’s in cyrillic, but our guess is ortega outsourced drone manufacturing and chip fabrication to a russian-owned facility in dubai.

I winced at cyrillic and russian-owned . There still wasn’t any hard proof, but the circumstantial evidence was growing mountainous.

JK:we have a major fucking problem.

JK:anya might be one of the bad guys. and she knows about the kill switch, the override code, everything. might have screengrabbed our last conversation too.

The pause that followed was unusually long for Sophie’s Formula 1 mind.

SW:that is doubleplusungood.

JK:i’m in her so-called uncle’s mansion right now, and they’re showing no inclination to let me out.

SW:where’s jesse?

JK:with her. he doesn’t know.

SW:let me think. if so, it’s bad but not yet calamitous, not quite. we still have options. one last hole card. but we have to move fast.

SW:just a sec, someone’s at the door.

I waited. And waited.

And then the little green dot which indicated that she was online went red.

I checked my Internet connection. It was fine. Sophie had abruptly ended our conversation. No: someone had abruptly ended our conversation. It wasn’t something she would have done, not without some kind of valediction.

I had an awful feeling that she wasn’t coming back.

My frantic preparations took only a few minutes. I left the Fluevogs and wore Asics instead. The Armani jacket in the closet was just big enough. Outside the darkening afternoon was chilly and foggy, which I hoped was sufficient justification for that light coat.

The FSU thug was waiting in the hall when I emerged.

“Can I help you?” His accented voice as bland as before.

“I just wanted to go up to the greenhouse.” I tried to look and sound defeated. It wasn’t hard. “To sit and think.”

He considered a moment, decided it was within the remit of his instructions. “I will show you.”

I didn’t protest that I already knew; I followed meekly, held arms tight against my sides in the elevator. I must have looked squirrelly and uncomfortable, but then I had good reason. Naturally he didn’t take me seriously as a threat or a flight risk. Nobody ever took me seriously. Everybody knew I was just an ordinary guy way out of his depth. I worried he might actually follow me into the greenhouse, in which case my plan would have required drastic and violent revision; but he waited outside, at the base of the stairs that led to the greenhouse’s steel door.

I was sweating heavily even before I stepped into that thick warm air. The rich botanical smell that only a few hours ago had seemed so sweet now made me want to gag. I made my way towards the bench on which Anya, Jesse and I had sat – and stopped halfway, staring out the window towards the circular driveway below, and the limousine pulling into it.

It came to a halt, and Anya emerged, moving briskly. Jesse did not.

There was still no evidence. Maybe I had constructed a paranoid fantasy with no foundation. Maybe she was on our side, Jesse had just stopped for a beer on the way back, there really was a security threat from Moscow, Sophie had been distracted by important breaking news, and that Cyrillic-language factory in Dubai was mere coincidence.

But no. Something was wrong, terribly wrong, I could feel it in my bones. Anya was the enemy. Now that she had confirmed what I had told her, now that the last chink in their armour had been filled, the iron fist had finally emerged from her velvet glove. Jesse had been taken to some kind of prison, and I was next.

I ducked into a corner between two rose bushes, hoping they might shield me from electronic eyes. There I stripped off my jacket, unwound the two king-size sheets wrapped around my chest, and knotted them together, trying to work fast with fumbling hands, wishing I had done this back in the bedroom. I half-expected the thug to race into the greenhouse and knock me out with some Russian martial art before I could put my plan into action.

But he didn’t come. I was hidden from the cameras, or they weren’t watching, or Anya’s return had served as a distraction. Or maybe there were no cameras after all.

I hurried over to the wrought-iron bench, looked up at the four-foot triangular panes that made up the greenhouse wall, selected one. I thought of the raging Colombian river I had crossed with Lisa Reyes, and how she had told me to be confident, to visualize success. Then I crouched down, grabbed the bench, and heaved it all the way into the air.

It was much heavier than I expected, and something gave in my back, it felt like a string snapping beneath my skin, near my spine. I ignored the sudden pain and lumbered at my target, using the bench as a battering ram, half-expecting to either bounce right off or plunge right through.

Instead the brittle glass shattered with a gratifying smash!, and the recoil stopped me dead.